Robert Owen was born in Newton. His father was a saddlemaker and an ironmonger. After finishing school at the age of ten, Owen began a career in textiles, becoming one of the first importers of American cotton. These ventures proved profitable, leading Owen to try to find ways to rid the world of the “dark, satanic mills” that produced so many of the Industrial Age’s goods.
Buying a mill at New Lanark, Scotland, he set about reforming working conditions to include fair wages, comfortable workplaces, greater access to education (including nursery schools) and a general concern for the welfare of the worker that was almost unknown at the time. The commercial success at the New Lanark mill was sufficient to offset the costs of this great social experiment, and Owen soon expanded his thinking to society as a whole, publishing his thoughts and lecturing about the need for social reform based on shared resources..
With the 1816 publication of A New View of Society, Owen outlined a basic socialist philosophy based on small self-sufficient villages organized as largely self-sustaining units in cooperation with surrounding villages, a philosophy later expanded by Karl Marx and other Socialist thinkers.
One of Owen’s followers founded communities in accordance with these ideals, one in American at New Harmony, Indiana, and the other in Scotland at Orbiston. Although these communities did not succeed, Owen remains an pivotal figure in the struggle for workers’ rights, and his commitment led to greater awareness and commitment to better conditions for all.